JK
by HoistTheColours
Summary: It's been eleven years. Post-Clockwork AU.
1. Part l

**Part l**

He would be lying if he said he doesn't think about her.

How can he fucking _not_?

He remembers the first time he saw her, thinks about it all the time, carefully plucks the hazy-edged memory from his mind like it's hidden in a corner protected by slivers and shards of sharp glass, and he doesn't want to cut himself.

Not that he's ever minded spilling a little blood—or a lot of it, for that matter.

But in his mind's eye, she is there. Always there. Always in that room where it all began. So pale and so small; pink-cheeked and shivering from the cold, probably on the verge of frostbite without even knowing it. He remembers—more than anything else from that encounter—the way she stared at him, the way she looked at him, so openly, so… unafraid. She had been wary and unsure, yes, but not _afraid_ of him. Her curiosity far outweighed her fear. Perhaps that's why he liked her so much, why he still likes her after all these years, why he gives a _damn_ in the first place and can't stop _wondering_ about her.

What is she like now? What have the hands of time done to her? What has _she_ done to _it_?

He finds himself imagining what she looks like, wonders if her hair is still gold and tangled with ringlets, if her green eyes are still big and round and framed by thick, dark lashes, if she's tall or short, thin or fat. He wonders if she's shy or bold, if she is sitting quietly in a corner or standing in the middle of the room, commanding attention to all of those who will freely give it. Does she have hobbies, does she paint or draw or read or write, does she yearn with the need to create and build, or burn with the desire to destroy and destruct, to wreak havoc on the things in this world she doesn't understand?

Most of all, he wonders if she remembers. If she remembers _him_. Maybe that haunts him—the idea of her remembering. It makes him feel… it makes him _feel_. Do you get that? It makes him _feel._

He doesn't know if he wants her to remember him.

Of course he _does_ want her to, but then, a much smaller part of him, a part of him that stays tucked away on some top corner shelf in the marrow of his bones, realizes that if she does remember him, she'll remember everything else, all the things he put her through and all the things he made her do. And it's not that he feels _sorry_ for those things, because he _doesn't_ , and he would do everything over again in much the same way if he had to, but the thing is that he wants her to _like_ him. He doesn't want her to look back with some newfound semblance of teenage-clarity and realize how stupid and naïve she had been, and suddenly realize that he is a horrible monster, and that she hates him. He doesn't want that. He doesn't want that at all.

What he _does_ want makes the hairs on his arms stand on end, makes his throat feel dry and hot and tight, sets the blood in his veins on fire, makes white-hot heat crash over him in dizzying waves because of what he _wants_ and how he wants it, because he wants _,_ he craves, and he _needs_ , and it's with an intensity that burns him from the inside out.

Because what he wants is for her to need him again, to want him the way he wants her. He wants to feel that same unidentifiable magnetized force that drew them together, because he doesn't know _what_ he wants from her, just that he wants her again, wants to see her and have her until this forest fire beneath the surface of his skin is wet and sated.

That's what he wants.

He plans accordingly.

She is a little hard to find, at first; he does everything _but_ flip the whole city upside down and force it to shake out its pockets like its a little punk on the playground who's stolen _his_ lunch money, and now he wants it back. It's nothing a little persistence and a little uh, friendly _persuasion_ at the GCPD headquarters can't solve; people can be so accommodating when the knife's sharp enough and the angle's right.

So he does some digging in dark corners, spends some money and hires some people who can do a little digging for him so he doesn't have to himself and end up raising red flags. He's got a friend of a friend of a friend who can pull strings in high places, someone with all the right connections who can get him into all the right places—chief among them, being digitally birthed into the Gotham City public records system as a long-lost uncle twice removed to one _Taylor Borden_.

How strangely satisfying it is to learn her last name after all these years.

Now, he waits. Lies low for a few days, keep his gorgeous mug out of the papers and off the streets where the limelight won't touch it. It's maddening, the silence that seems to fall over Gotham in his very public and noticeable absence, and after a while people even seem to relax for a bit, like some heavy burden has been lifted from their shoulders and they can take deep breaths without having to worry about inhaling noxious fumes.

He hates it, but he knows it will be worth it.

When his requests are processed, and his likeness stares knowingly at him from a state-issued ID that reads 'Joe Kerr', he knows it's time.

The leaves are dying slowly. It's that time of the year. The pavement is littered with the shriveled, gold and red dried-up leftovers of a forgotten summer, and the air is crisp and sharp. The sky is that obnoxiously pretty shade of eggshell blue, without a single cloud to mar its vibrancy. Above him, the sun winks at him as he walks, its rays catching and flickering between skyscrapers that the Joker imagines to be Jenga blocks instead, so fragile and so full of destructive promise if he could just pluck the right block and send the whole thing crashing to the ground. Maybe another day.

He dresses up for the occasion—or perhaps dresses down is the better word, forgoing his usual greasepaint and dyed green hair.

Well—he hadn't been able to get _all_ the green out, but it will do. The baseball cap will hide most of it, anyway.

The orphanage is in one of the more upstanding parts of Gotham, if you consider buildings that aren't derelict and keeling over due to neglect 'upstanding'. Regardless, it isn't in the Narrows, which is a step up no matter which way you look at it. It's not far from one of Gotham's lower-end shopping districts, where there's a mall and a baseball stadium and a park, and the orphanage nestled just outside of that. It's a small, plain building. Square. Bars over the windows, even the ones on the third floor. Looks more like a prison than a temporary home for young children. The way the buildings around it are arranged make it so that there hasn't been a single strand of sunlight to touch the building in years. The brick is hard and cold, cast in a perpetual shade it can do nothing about. It is dismal, to say the least.

The inside doesn't fare much better. He steps into a short but narrow hallway. Dark. Lit only by the daylight that the square, frosted glass window over the door allows. The paint on the walls—navy blue—is peeling, and the off-white trim is bruised and battered and dirty, littered with fingerprints and skid marks.

He takes a moment to fix his clothes, make sure his hair is tucked into his baseball cap, wets his dry and chapped lips. They feel odd without the greasepaint. Bare. He doesn't like it, but he knows this is a small price to pay to see her again.

Everything in his body is fueled by an electric current, his veins thrumming with an anticipation so palpable he can taste the copper tang of livewire on his tongue. He is both impatient and excited, and, maybe, even a touch _nervous_. Anxious. The only thing he knows about her is that she's alive, she's _alive,_ and he will see her for the first time in eleven years.

He goes to the tall counter at the end of the hall. It's empty, but there is an office behind it. He walks closer to see over the countertop. The room behind it is crammed tight with filing cabinets, plastic bins spilling with papers, and an equally overflowing desk, the surface of which is not even visible. There is apparently so much paper that they've moved to utilizing the walls. There isn't a single space of wall that isn't occupied by a push-pin or Post-It note.

The Joker lets his eyes wander to the figure slumped behind the desk: an overweight woman with coarse, black hair—more grayish than black—passed out in a dead sleep, her mouth open as she snores.

He smacks his lips and leans against the counter, slicks back his hair and then clears his throat. Loudly.

The woman jolts awake, the rolls of fat gathered beneath her neck, like the jowls of a turkey, becoming even more prominent when she sits upright. She takes a minute to find her glasses—which are hanging around her neck—and puts them on before she looks up at him through a haze of sleep.

He waits for her vision to focus before addressing her. Time to butter her up.

"Hello, doll," he drawls. He watches the way her eyebrows raise, two very, very thin lines, with an arch drawn so high the Joker thinks it will recede into her hairline. She huffs to get out of her chair so she can give him a closer look.

She awards him the same courtesy. Up close, her face is pale and moony, and there are dark circles, the color of day-old bruises, permanently tattooed on the bags under her eyes. The blue blouse stretched across her belly is about three sizes too small. The Joker stares at her breasts—or rather, the buttons that run vertically down her front—that look like they are barely holding on by a thread, and will threaten to pop open if she would just move or bend over the wrong way. He lifts his gaze to meet her dead-eyed stare.

"Can I help you?" she drones.

Hm. Not interested, then. This isn't going to be as easy as he thought, but the Joker just so happens to be _good_ at getting people to do what he wants, especially if that includes overlooking a few questionable discrepancies in the background check she's going to have to run for a person who doesn't actually exist—miniscule discrepancies, really.

He lays it on thick—as he is wont to do—and butters her up _reaaal_ nice, bats his eyelashes, stares pointedly at her… feminine assets, if you catch his drift, says some things that are perhaps a touch suggestive, perhaps a touch not depending on where your mind is. And _her_ mind? Stuck about 2.5 miles back at home within the pages of _Fifty Shades of Gray_ lying on the nightstand next to the black, ribbed-for-her-pleasure dildo.

He's not joking. He's _seen_ it.

She relaxes, then—or perhaps that's not _quite_ the word for the way her pits are sweating through her blouse, and her panties are as wet as a coastal city during a hurricane, and he can _smell_ the pheromones radiating off her.

She introduces herself as Deb, and yes, yes he already knows, can we get to the _point_ already?

Soon, though, as predicted, she melts into the palm of his hand. Give or take fifteen minutes and a hell of a lot of patience, and his little plan is sold and in the bag. She is so utterly delighted that a handsome man such as himself _deigns_ it upon himself to give her the time of day that she all but ignores basic protocol. He stares at her in a way that makes her face deep red—like the color of strawberry filling inside a jelly donut—and turns her eyes glassy with want.

"I—I'll just go get her, Mr. Kerr," she says, and the Joker nods, offers a salacious little smile, and makes a point of staring at her meaty bottom as she turns from him and does as she's told.

When the door clicks shut behind her, the Joker spins on his heels and paces, is all nerves and staccato energy once more, feels a shiver run through him in a way he hasn't felt in a long while.

The tick of the plastic wall clock sounds magnified and slow, as if time itself has slowed to a crawl just to torment him for his impatience.

His mouth is dry. His palms sweat. His pulse races, blood crashing around in his body like it doesn't know where it's going. He thinks the reaction he is having is almost _comical_ , and he wants to laugh at the _absurdity_ of all it, he does, but before he can, he hears the door creak open and he stops, turns slowly, so slowly, to look, to see _her_ after all these years.

Taylor.

She looks at him and he looks at her and everything in the room falls away, like it's just them, them in this empty, space-less void where nothing else exists, not even sound.

He tries to read her face, tries to gauge if that expression sprawled so openly across her features is one of recognition. But she just looks at him like… like she's confused. Puzzled. Like maybe she has seen him before, but only in a far-off dream that was already half-forgotten by the time she'd woken up.

He watches the way she tilts her head and bites the flesh of her bottom lip, frowns a little, like she just can't pinpoint where she's seen him before. The look sends a thrill down his spine, her expression so reminiscent of the ones he knows he has often made himself, and he can't help but wonder if it's an expression she learned from him, if it's something she unconsciously picked up from him and has been doing all these years they've been apart.

More still, he _delights_ in the way interest flashes in her eyes seconds later—green eyes, still so fucking _green_ —something akin to wonder and fascination flitting across her gaze as she eyes him up and down.

She blushes when she realizes what she's done, when she realizes he hasn't looked away or blinked since the moment she stepped into the room, and he loves it, feels such intense satisfaction spark through him from her reaction… but then Deb breaks the spell to interrupt, and the trance is momentarily broken. Taylor averts her gaze to the floor.

Deb takes the opportunity to move a little closer so she can squeeze a bicep and introduce him as Taylor's "Uncle Joe", and remarks on how _nice_ it is that he has come to visit. The Joker tries hard not to glare at her in a way that reveals how badly he wants to string her up by her thick ankles and cut out her insides so he can force-feed her her own entrails.

"Deb. _Debbie_ ," he croons. "Maybe it'd be best if me and the little lady here had some _pri-va-cee_. Get to be uh, reacquainte _d_. Wouldn't that be alright?"

She nods furiously. "Of course!" she says too quickly. "Yes, yes, right over here." She leads them the short distance to the sitting room, a square, windowless space with a table and four chairs that looks more like an interrogation room than a room where parents can interact and get to know their potential future child in a quiet and private setting.

Deb urges Taylor to sit down and then fusses over Uncle Joe. Can I take your jacket? Would you like some coffee? Water? Tea?

He declines all offers without once taking his eyes off Taylor, not even when the door shuts and it is finally silent, finally the two of them after all these years.

He knows he is staring at her like he wants to devour her. It makes her cheeks flush in the same way she did when she was little, but it's different now because she's grown up, and she knows grownup things and that people can be more ill-intentioned than all those years of childhood innocence would lead you to believe.

But she didn't exactly have those years of luxury, did she? Because he plucked that from her without consent, without asking if that was what she wanted. He's not ashamed of it because he doesn't feel shame, and he doesn't regret it because he likes what he's done to her, liked it when he did it and knows he wouldn't have done things differently.

He licks his lips and forgets they're not slathered in greasepaint. Misses the taste. He slides his tongue along the inside of his cheek instead, tastes the rippled scar tissue there and finds his voice.

"You have _grown_ ," he tells her, without any sort of special lilt to his voice. It's not a question, not a taunt, just the honest truth, perhaps the most honest thing he's said in a while.

He waits for a response, _hungers_ for the sound of her voice, needs to hear her say something, anything, but she doesn't reply at all, just looks at him with wide-eyed wonder and a sliver of fear. She's _scared_ of him.

That makes him angry.

She didn't used to be scared. Not like this. What he wants now is for her to open up to him like a flower, the way she once had eleven years ago when she was too young and too naïve to know any better, to know that opening up to him was _dangerous_.

In the silence that follows, he studies her. He doesn't try to make it look like he isn't, he just does. Stares at her hair—still blonde, a slightly darker shade of it—which is straight now instead of curly. Stares at her eyes, mouth, the shape of her neck and shoulders and everything below that that is visible before the table cuts off his view. Stares at this teenage version of the little girl who had once clung to him in a way that no one ever had. Time hasn't changed her much, except where it has changed her most of all.

Her eyes are dark, now, no longer full of hope and clung-to promises, or the special kind of innocence that only children can possess. Her eyes now tell the story of someone who has seen too many of the horrible things that the world has to offer, that Gotham has to offer. There is no faith there, no hope that one day the world will right itself and that good will triumph evil. There is simply the pain in knowing that the world is busted and broken, and that even if one day the world _is_ righted, it will not undo or compensate for all the wrongdoings, for the rapes and racism and murders and conglomerate of sins of a people drunk on power.

The seconds continue to tick by. Why won't she _say_ something?

He finds himself getting impatient. He licks his lips and shifts in his chair. "You don't know who I am, do you? You don't… _remember_ me."

She looks at him like he's just spoken a foreign language, but he knows she understands because she shakes her head, just the slightest bit, to indicate that no, she doesn't remember him. She doesn't know who 'Uncle Joe' is or that she even had an uncle in the first place.

As the silence lingers, the Joker feels his patience waning. He is, for perhaps the first time, unsettled by the way she is staring at his scars. It's not the _way_ she is staring that he doesn't like, but the fact that it's _her_ staring. She had once, in her childish curiosity and delight, told him that his scars looked like caterpillars. Now she is looking at him like he's going to gut her.

Maybe he will.

"You see something you _like_?" He doesn't know why he's this angry all the sudden, why this little teenage girl who hasn't even _said_ anything is able to pull these kind of emotions out of him, is able to make his blood boil like this, but he can't stop himself, can't grab ahold of this way she is making him feel.

"Answer me," he growls, knowing he has to keep his voice low so _Deb_ doesn't get suspicious. "These interest you?" he asks, gesturing to his scars. This time he doesn't wait for a response. He snarls and lunges for her. " _Maybe you'd like a closer look."_

He stands before she can even register what he is doing, his chair scraping across the floor as his arm reaches for her and closes around her throat, hauling her out of her chair and halfway across the table so the tips of her shoes barely touch the floor.

He is breathing so hard he can barely see straight. Her neck is so soft and pliant beneath his hand, and he feels the muscles of her trachea contracting as it struggles for air. He doesn't cut off all her air, just enough to make her eyes widen in fear, but she doesn't fight him.

She doesn't fight him.

This close, he can see the freckles dotted along the bridge of her nose and cheeks, can see his own reflection in the dark irises of her eyes, and the faint, purpled leftovers from an old bruise on her temple. A bruise from what or _whom_ he doesn't know.

He stares at her, and she stares at him, and he thinks for a moment he is going to crush her and how fucking _easy_ it would be, how good it would feel to hear her choked gasps for air and the crunch of her vertebrae—but all that bloodlust fades almost as instantly as it had come. Taylor reaches out a hand, slowly, almost tenderly, and touches the scar on his left cheek.

She is _crying_.

He freezes at the foreign touch, at the way he can feel every groove and ridge on the pads of her fingers against the furled and rippled flesh of his scar. His grip loosens until his hand drops entirely, and when their eyes meet, he sees _recognition_ flash in her eyes.

She stares at him in awe, unblinking, and then she sobs aloud and collapses into him, wraps her arms around his neck in an embrace, her knees planted on the table, and he doesn't do anything but stand there as she sobs into his neck and grips him with bruising force.

"It's you," she says, and her voice cracks, and it's the first time he's heard her voice in eleven years. She sounds so little and afraid. "You came back for me."

He feels something like a smile biting at his mouth, something like _relief_ wash over him. "Leave you here all by yourself? Why, I would _never_."

She sniffles and he can feel her tears on his neck. "I… I remember when you told me that," she says, as if she is awed that she does remember.

She pulls away from him, and when she does her cheeks are ruddy and her eyelashes are soaked from crying, and she's embarrassed to be kneeling on the table, so she quickly gets down, he steps back, and she dusts invisible dirt off her jeans which are three sizes too big.

It's quiet for a moment, the two of them standing there, the Joker still trying to process that she remembers him, remembers him after _eleven years_. He feels… cautious. Like maybe this could be a bad thing, or maybe he could twist it in his favor, or maybe he doesn't have to.

"How much do you remember?" he hears himself asking, quietly, like there's a sudden spell cast over the room and he doesn't want to break it, doesn't want this moment to spontaneously combust and to wake up and realize this was all some strange, psychotic dream.

"They tried to make me forget. The therapy, I—it didn't work. But seeing you… I remember everything." She looks up at him. "Oh, _God_ , I remember everything." She puts a hand to her forehead as if she suddenly has a headache, and a look of panic crosses her features. She looks so much like a child when she stumbles towards the nearest chair and sinks into it, pulls her knees to her chest and bows her head so it rests atop them. "All of it," she breathes.

The Joker's mind races. He wonders if this is the moment where she'll realize that she hates him for what he's done, for all the things he made her see and all the things he made her _do_.

Her voice cuts through the silence with all of the intensity of a sharpened sword. She looks at him. She has to know. "Are you going to kill me? Is that—is that why you came?" The thought of it breaks her. "I—I waited for you, after all this time and you…." she trails off, unable to finish, and the Joker's face hurts from how hard he is grinning.

This… this is not what he had expected. Before—before all of this—he hadn't wanted her to remember, hadn't wanted her to see him as the monster that he is. But now… now that's exactly what he _wants_. He wants all of those memories to come flooding back to her, for her to remember every last disgusting, gritty detail of their story. He'll make her remember that he saved her life while simultaneously destroying it. She'll remember and he'll make her feel _glad_ that it happened.

The Joker hears himself laugh after a long beat of silence has passed. He _laughs_ , and Taylor buries her head as if her fate's been sealed. He is grinning when he kneels in front of her, pulls down her legs so she can't shield herself from him, and forces her to look at him.

" _Kill_ you? After everything we've been through? No. No, no, no, no, _no_ ," he says quickly. He shifts too close, so energized now. He sees only her and the map work of her brain laid out before him and the way he is going to _twist_ and _tangle_ all the roads and pathways so she doesn't even know which way is up and which is down. "That'd be too easy. Too _boring_. Because you know what's much more interesting to me than all that?" He shifts so he's closer, grips the legs of the chair. He realizes he's got her right where he wants her, where she's open and vulnerable and his for the taking. "I think you're mad at me that I didn't come back for you sooner, and I think you pined for me like the _sweeee-t_ lonely little girl you are," here his voice drops, "and I think despite all that you still _love_ me, and I wanna hear you _say it_."

She looks away as if he's read something from her diary, and if she looks away fast enough, maybe he won't be able to decipher if his words are true. The room feels weighted and buried in a heavy silence. He already knows what she's going to ask next.

"Why didn't you come back for me sooner?" she asks, and her voice cracks from the weight of her words. "I… I _waited_. I didn't know it was you I was waiting for. But I did wait." The tears lodged in her throat makes her voice crack. "I waited for so long."

"And that makes you mad, doesn't it?"

She can't look at him. "Yes," she whispers.

"But you still love me after all this time, don't you? You still wished I would come, thought about me eveeery night that you laid awake in your little bed, wishing on all those _stars_ you saw outside your window that I would come for you." When she doesn't reply he grips her chin in a vice and forces her eyes to his. " _Didn't you_?"

"Yes," she sobs.

The Joker scowls and releases her chin as if he is physically repulsed by her. "You are disgusting," he sneers. "Weak. Do you think anyone could possibly _want_ someone so pathe- _tic_?" He leans back on his haunches, lets go of the legs of the chair. "You, so desperately clinging to idea that I would come and _save_ you, that I would _rescue_ you so you can have the fairytale ending you've been wanting and we'll all live haaappily ever after." He _tsks_. "You are in love with a _monster_. Think about all those things that I've done, _that I made you do_. Doesn't that _shame_ you? Doesn't that make you just _hate yourself_ for the way that you feel?"

Taylor shook her head, fresh tears spilling down her cheeks. "Stop this. What are you doing?"

"Telling you the _truth_. You're old enough now to know the relationship between cause and effect, and that every action has _consequences_." He leans in close, then, changing his approach, letting everything he just said weigh down upon her so that it sinks into every pore, worms its way inside her like a parasite and eats away at every part of her that doubts his words. He's planted the seed, now it's time to watch it grow.

He reaches out and tucks a long strand of hair behind her ear. "You're so _fragile_ ," he whispers. "A liii-ttle broken _doll_. No one else can change that, not even _you_." He raises his brows, almost as if daring her to challenge his words. She won't, though, not when he can see her hanging off of his every word even though she'd like him to think that she isn't. "Out there," he gestures behind him, to the dirty streets of Gotham just behind that wall, "the world will eat you alive. It will _crush_ you until you are nothing but ashes and dus _t_. Gotham… it has a way of finding your _weak_ spots and _digging_ and _burrowing_ into those holes with a five-inch bla _de_ until you've _bled out_ and nothing of you is left." He grips the seat of her chair on either side of her. "Out there, no one can protect you, and no one will _want_ to because of the things you've done, because you are a dirty, pathetic piece of _shit_." Taylor winces at the insult, at the intensity at which it is delivered. "But I can," the Joker says, watches as he tears away that last shred of her innocence, tears it right in fucking half. "I'm the only one who can save you now."

He studies her intently. Doesn't say anything as he watches all her emotions flash freely across her face, reading her just like he used to when she was a child.

She is too stunned to say anything, and when he stands, when he leaves to let her mind simmer with all the seeds he's planted in there, she cries out for him, just when his hand is on door, ready to turn the knob.

" _Wait_! You can't leave me," she pleads, sounding so desperate and afraid, so much like the little girl who had been taken from him and forced into the back of a police car against her will as she screamed for him. She jumps out of her chair and stands to face him, curls her arms around her middle like a lifeline, like it's the only thing keeping her upright. "I know that I need you. You can't leave me here again. _Please_."

The Joker faces the door and grins. He doesn't turn around.

"Oh, sugar, don't you worry. I'm gonna come back."

* * *

 _ **Author's Notes:**_ This is, as the summary states, an AU where Blackout doesn't exist. It takes place eleven years post Clockwork.


	2. Part ll

**Part ll**

The power had gone out again.

The digital clock reads 2:27, and the glowing numbers flash in intervals from across the dark expanse of the room, like the way traffic lights flash red late at night at four-way stops. There is no trace of moonlight through the curtains, no telling what time it really is.

Taylor rolls over onto her side and fishes for her wristwatch on the nightstand. Can't read it in the dark. She heaves a quiet sigh, careful not to wake the occupant sleeping on the other side of the room. She kicks off the covers, stands. Her nightgown falls to her thighs, and she feels the hairs on her arms and legs stand at attention at the sudden, sharp bite of the cold.

The hardwood floor is a cinderblock of ice under her bare feet. She pads silently to the door, opens it. The hallway greets her, empty and black, like a starless night. She feels her way towards the bathroom, trailing her hand along the wall as a point of contact. Even the wall carries a chill, like it too wishes to be enveloped in a blanket of warmth, protected from the winter elements.

She steps inside the bathroom, and blindly reaches for the light switch; the nightlight had burnt out three weeks ago, and no one had thought to replace it. She fingers the wall in the dark, trying to find the switch, when she suddenly becomes aware of a presence looming behind her. She gasps as the body behind her crowds her into the bathroom, closing the door. She thinks for a moment that it's Meredith, that she had been too loud getting out of bed. She stumbles forward, and there's the flick of the light switch, and then the overhead above the mirror shining like a spotlight—harsh and accosting. She squints against it, can't see for a long moment.

"The fuck are you doing?"

Now the hairs on her arms stand on end for a different reason.

"Nathan, I—"

The door closes. He shoves her aside. She has to catch herself on the towel rack to keep from falling.

"Watch out. I gotta piss."

She's too stunned to move, watches him without really meaning to. He plants his bare feet on the scruffy peach rug that rims the toilet. The clang of porcelain as he flips up the seat and it hits the back of the toilet. Watches him pull down his mesh athletic shorts. His pale cock.

She finally turns away, goes to open the bathroom door.

"Stay," he commands, without even looking at her. "Turn around."

And that's the power he has over her. He doesn't even have to look at her, doesn't have to pin her where she stands with one narrow-eyed, meaningful glare. He just speaks, and she obeys. She knows better than to challenge him. Not after last time.

She turns around, but doesn't look at him— _can't_ look at him, focusing instead on her reflection in the bottom, right-hand corner of the mirror, where her hand is clenched in a tight fist around her watch. She had only wanted to use the bathroom light to check the time.

She listens to the hard stream of his piss hit the toilet. Hears the last few droplets inside the bowl as the stream tapers off. The sound of his relieved sigh. She grimaces when he flushes. It's so loud, she hopes it doesn't wake anyone up.

She doesn't look when he comes towards her, his shorts still around his thighs. "Clean it."

She backs herself into the corner. He follows. She can't help but think how out of place he looks, so tall and butch against the sea-foam walls, the soap dish shaped like a cockle seashell, the coral-colored towels, the open drawer beneath the sink full of feminine pads wrapped in daisy-patterned plastic. Taylor stares up at his bare chest, the few stray brown hairs there, the same color as the wiry hair around his cock. The sign of manhood.

"No," she whispers. She can barely hear her own voice above the thudding of her heart. "Please don't make me."

He reaches for her hand but she quickly tucks both arms behind her back, hiding them from him. He grimaces but isn't deterred. She watches as he reaches for her nightgown with one hand and then grabs his cock with the other, wiping the cotton fabric back and forth across his cockhead. She can feel his eyes on her face the whole time. She's so hot with shame she wonders if he can feel it too, the way it radiates off her as if she were a furnace, or an oven with the door left open.

Dry now, he tucks himself back into his shorts. Taylor can't bear to meet his eyes, stares at the floor and wishes it would swallow her whole, wishes that sand would materialize in this makeshift bathroom beach, just for an instant, just long enough for her to escape from this moment and never return.

"You really are a piece of shit." He laughs without mirth, the kind of laugh that makes her insides shrivel up, makes her feel small. Worthless. Then the flat of his palm meets her forehead with a force that sends the back of her head knocking against the wall behind her. _Bang_. Galaxies flash before her eyes, like the kind you see when you rub your eyes with your balled up fists, and sparkly blue stars appear against a Vantablack backdrop.

The disgust in his voice alone would have been enough to knock her down, but when coupled with his own unique brand of vulgarity, it sends shame of the likes she's never felt before rippling through her insides, knocking down pillars of confidence, self-worth—slabs of stone she had constructed with painstaking effort and time. Devastating, how years' worth of careful cultivation could be obliterated in only a matter of seconds, as if those pillars had been erected using paper instead of stone.

She crawls back into bed, under her covers, stinking of Nathan's piss. She has nothing else to wear, and it is her only set of pajamas. Evelyn will kill her if she arrives at the breakfast table in the morning with her school clothes wrinkled.

She settles into bed and pulls her quilt up to her chin, tries to breathe in the fibers of her bedspread, tries not to think about what just happened, how violated she feels. Tries not to think about what he'd said to her.

What she tries most not to think about, though, is how different those same words had sounded coming out of Mr. J's mouth, how they'd had an entirely different effect on her.

 _You are a dirty, pathetic piece of shit._

Goose bumps prickle across her skin; she touches her arm and feels them erupt beneath the pads of her fingers, something almost electric about them, like someone, somewhere, has jumpstarted a livewire current beneath her skin. She can still hear his voice, remembers exactly how he'd sounded when he'd told her those words, the _way_ he'd said them, the disgust, the finality, like that was all she would ever be. Remembers the way she had recoiled at first, how she had cried, feeling betrayed by his cruelty. She'd been angry at him for being so callous, so brutally honest, for leaving her with that gut-punched, hollow feeling in her stomach, like being pushed to the ground at recess and having the wind knocked out of her.

And then after, the numinous realization that maybe he was right, that maybe she _was_ disgusting, fragile, broken. The pungent, heady truth of his words, how much they'd terrified and settled her all at once. Like drowning for years, only to have him come back and cast a line to her, draw her in to some distant shore and breathe new life into her, new meaning.

It's the easiest truth she's ever swallowed, like downing a cup from the Lethe. That's how she knows he's right, the ease at which his words had slid down her throat, the way they'd tasted on her palate, how they'd settled somewhere deep inside her, in a place no one had ever reached, in a place she herself had never touched or seen, like discovering a new path in the woods you'd somehow overlooked, or some secret cupboard in the house that no one had ever told you about.

He'd told her that the world would chew her up and spit her back out again, told her that she deserved that. That no one could ever want someone like her, could ever protect her. No one could save her from herself.

Only he could.

Her new meaning is that she has no meaning. She understands that now. She is nothing outside of his plane of existence, nothing outside of this planetary orbit she inhibits, at which he is the center, and she the revolving force.

Who was she without the gray pallor of his shadow cast over her? And who was she without his eyes on her, drinking her in in that way that only he could. Who was she without his careful hands, shaping her, grounding her, molding her to him in this way she was preordained to be.

She needs him. She is nothing without him. Only he can save her.

A small part of her hopes that he needs her too. She clings to that hope, clings to it because it's all she has to hold onto.

He had promised he would come back. He had _promised_.

It was all she could do not to spontaneously combust, to burst with hapless energy at every seam, dart in the middle of a busy street just so the anxiety of waiting for him to return would come to an abrupt end. He plagues her constantly, his sillage, the veil of his essence that he's left behind for her, like some terrible parting gift. It clouds her every thought, impedes her vision at every turn. She cannot even navigate to its edges to pull it back, to lift it, like being trapped in a burning house where the smoke's so thick and black you can't even see your own hands.

She realizes there is not a moment that exists where she is not thinking about him, even if he is tucked somewhere in the back of her mind; and if he is there, in the corner reaches, he doesn't stay there for long, eventually sidling his way to the forefront, where he does not allow her to rest, where he demands her attention, every last thread of it. It all belongs to him. He might as well have her on a leash. She goes where he pulls, and that is all.

She knows this is dangerous, this want that she has, this aching, pulsing need that she continues to feed, that she births new life to day after day. Every day brings a new fantasy, something selcouth and intangible, the kind that grips her hard by the heart, squeezes with an intensity that leaves her breathless, keeled over in bed in pain. She feels as though her body has betrayed her. She wants, wants, _wants,_ with the sort of physicality she is not used to, that she doesn't understand, can't make sense of.

She has never felt this way before, can't even put a name to what she's feeling. She wonders if this is how Nathan feels when he comes into her room at night when Meredith is sleeping at a friend's house, when he pushes her down on her bed onto her stomach and humps her like a dog, comes all over her underwear. Is that what she's feeling? Is it that same uncontrollable urge to just take, touch, have?

She ignores the thrill of wondering whether Mr. J has ever felt that way about her, if this same need is something he's wrought with. If he's in just as much pain as she is.

Somehow her body craves his presence as much as her mind does. And that's an ache she cannot give much thought to—she forbids herself from it, is confused by it. She thinks a lot about the way his hands had felt around her neck, the way her pulse slowed beneath his grip, the way his scars had felt beneath the pad of her fingertips… wonders why she wants that so badly, wonders why being so close to him sets her on fire, why the thought of redamancy existing between them is something she craves so desperately.

She replays these fantasies of him and her over and over again with a palinoia that borders on insanity. But she can't stop. It's the only fuel she has. Now that she's had a taste of this, now that she knows he's out there, she can't just go back to the life she's been living, a thought so horrible it has her running to the nearest toilet during fourth period to unload all the contents of her stomach from that day. Simply put: the idea of returning to her same old routine is a fear she can no longer stomach. She lives only for the future, for the moment that Mr. J will return for her.

The worst part—aside from the agony of waiting, of hoping—is knowing that everyone can see it.

Teachers tell her she's distant. Evelyn—her foster mother, one of eight, so far—is one strike away from sending her back to the orphanage. She says it's because Taylor is "not in invested in the family" and "depressed". "Ungrateful" is another complaint that is thrown around with newfound regularity. That one is her favorite insult to hurl; that Taylor is ungrateful, doesn't appreciate Evelyn opening up her home to her, providing her with a warm place to stay, food on the table.

But she was never welcome here. She knew that from the beginning. Meredith had resented her from the start—and why shouldn't she? Being forced to share her room with a total stranger, her clothes, her toys, her books. Taylor remembers the first night, Meredith carefully constructing a duct-tape line across the floor, clearing demarking her side of the room from Taylor's. Afterwards she stood with her hand on her bedpost, looking like Buzz Aldrin clutching the flag on the moon just after he's staked his claim. _I was here first._

"Touch something on my side of the room, and you die."

Nathan was different. He had at least pretended to like her, had made an effort to get close to her. But it didn't take long for her to grow wary of him, of the way he asserted himself around her. Sitting too close, the not-so-tender way he laid a heavy hand on her thigh beneath the dinner table, finding reasons to barge into the bathroom when he knew it was occupied, smiling at her in a way she knew was more predatory than friendly. It only took two weeks for his patience to snap completely.

That first time, after school, just the two of them at home, Evelyn at work, Meredith at softball practice. The way he'd come into her room, the heat in his gaze, the resounding click of the lock as the door closed. She'd gotten up immediately—to run, to fight him off, she didn't know. But all she could do was cry. Cry when he forced her to her knees, cry when he pulled down his shorts, tugged at his cock until he'd come all over her face. And when he forced himself into her mouth, she bit down, hard.

And then she cried again, when he beat her black and blue. She could barely walk. At the dinner table, with a black eye, bruised ribs, and a busted, fat lip, she explained she'd gotten in a fight at school. Evelyn sent her upstairs without anything to eat as punishment.

It's been two months since then, and four since Mr. J had come to her at the orphanage, had revealed himself to her, four months since the floodgates in her mind were opened and out poured a tumultuous wave of memories she thought she had lost.

Every day that is marked by another absence is even harder to swallow than the last. Time becomes a weighted, physical burden that she can no longer shoulder. She tries to make sense of this, why he hasn't come yet, what is taking so long, but she comes up empty-handed every time. She needs him, and he has not come.

It's almost New Years. Taylor is thankful for the end of Christmas break, cannot take another day at Evelyn's, another day of hiding in her room, of trying to occupy as little space as possible curled up in her bed, trying not to incur Meredith's anger. Another day of trying to keep her distance from Nathan.

It works, for a while. She feigns sick by pressing her face against the heating vent on the floor in the corner of the room, and then diving back under the covers when she hers footsteps approaching. Evelyn checks her temperature with the back of her hand and declares she has a fever. And Taylor lies in bed for three days and milks it for all she's worth.

Christmas passes, and she returns to school. It's a welcome distraction, at least for a while. Her thoughts drift in class, and at lunch she sits alone and hears the other girls whispering about her shoddy clothes while they sit at their respective tables dressed in their new Christmas gifts—beautiful woven sweaters with matching sparkly headbands, fleece-lined boots that lace up to the knee, big puffy coats to block out the coming brumal chill of January.

She pokes at her dry slab of ham and slops her mashed potatoes around her plate with her fork, stale leftovers from the meal that was served one and a half weeks ago before school let out for Christmas.

When the final bell rings for the day, Taylor gathers her books from her locker and clambers onto the bus with the other students who live in South Side. She takes her usual seat near the back and rests her head against the window. Feels the cold glass against her scalp, watches her warm breath fog up the glass, blurring everything from view. It doesn't take long for the bus to fill, and it lurches forward in a way that jostles her in her seat, making her sit up straight.

She watches one dilapidated house pass after the other. Houses marred by drooping powerlines, struggling beneath the weight of last night's snowfall. Gray houses with chipped, concrete steps and missing porch railings, houses with tarps over leaky rooves, boards over broken windows, houses with junk in the yard that cannot be salvaged, with broken down cars permanently parked in loose gravel driveways, covered in black tarps like oversized body bags. Houses with dead, skeletal bushes that bare all of their gnarled bones, empty flower pots that have turned into cigarette butt receptacles, wicker furniture with missing limbs, as if blown away in some long-forgotten war.

The bus stops in a busier housing development, one where the majority of kids get out and the bus is noticeably quieter in their absence. Taylor watches them cross in front of the bus to the other side of the street to disband their separate ways. And that's when she sees him.

Mr. J, sitting on a bench beneath the plastic bus shelter. Looking straight at her.

Her heart stops point blank, and for a second she can't even breathe. The bus lurches forward suddenly, and Taylor has to catch herself on the seat in front of her. When she cranes her head back to look at the bus stop, he's gone.

Gone, just like that.

Her heart feels as though it's caught in the vices of a clenched fist. Fear grips her, somewhere low in her belly, where she can't pull it out; part of her is ready to jump out of her seat and rush to the front of the bus, demand that the driver stop so she can get off. But another part of her wonders if he had just been a mirage, a figment of an overactive imagination, one that is clinging too hard to hope, to what she wants to see. How is it possible that he could be there one second and then gone the next? As the bus pulls further away, her eyes dart back and forth, scanning all nearby surroundings, but there's no sign of him.

She settles back into her seat, wills her heart to calm, even as goose bumps prickle over her arms like the bite of sharp thorns. He had looked so _real_. Had it all been a fever-dream? Was she really so desperate for him that her mind would resort to conjuring him sitting alone at a bus stop?

At home, she cried in bed beneath the safety of her covers, hating how pathetic she was, hating _him_ for taking so long to fulfill his promise, to come back for her.

The next day, after school has let out and she has raced to the bus to effectively be the first one on, she sits in her usual seat with her eyes glued to the window and her heart caught somewhere in the spiral columns of her throat, blocking her airway.

The minutes crawl by with an agonizing stagnancy of which there is no comparison. She tongues at her bottom lip with harried impatience and bounces her knee and digs her fingers into her thighs and knows she must look crazy.

As the bus slows and the familiar stop approaches, she scoots to the edge of her seat and impatiently scans the area, feeling like every muscle in her body has gone rigid in anticipation, every moving part inside of her is lying still in wait.

The disappointment takes only seconds to crash over her, one big tidal wave of it to drown her whole. She should have known better than to get her hopes up.

Taylor has to squeeze her eyes shut to keep the tears from spilling. Anger is hot and heavy in her chest, so startling in its intensity that it practically burns—but despair is quick to follow, and it coats everything in its wake, like a thick blanket of ash. She feels nothing but numbness.

Meredith is sleeping at a friend's house. It's three o'clock in the morning. Taylor hears Nathan's heavy footfalls as he slinks back to his room. She lies in bed staring at the ceiling with dried tear tracks on her cheeks and realizes she must face the heinous truth: Mr. J lied to her.

She cries for him. She cries for him in the way you cry for a lover who doesn't love you back, or for someone you love whose scope of understanding is so far removed from love, that you know they could never feel the same way about you as you feel for them. She cries for how tightly she'd clung to meliorism, this idea that he'd come for her and suddenly all of her troubles would disintegrate. She thought she'd belong somewhere, she'd have purpose. She'd be rescued. _Saved_.

There is a lesson to be learned in all of this, and it is that hope is a dangerous thing to cling to, perhaps the most dangerous thing in the world if clung to too tightly. She's staked her entire future—her world—around an idea, a hope, only to have it come crashing down around her.

What else left for her is there? She cannot make it without him—he'd made that much clear. Her only hope is nepenthe, or perhaps to enter some fugue state where the past ceases to exist, where she forgets everything, even her own name. Only then can she be free of this.

It's New Year's Eve. The snow has all melted, leaving in its wake dirty, gray-slush streets. Meredith is having friends over from school to spend the night—a fact she makes abundantly clear when she tells Taylor that if she dares come downstairs during her slumber party, Meredith will be having a lot more sleepovers at other friends' houses in the future. The threat makes Taylor pause in a way that she never has before, a frisson of fear rippling through her insides, gripping her with a tenacity she'd felt only once before.

Meredith _knew_.

This whole time she'd known what Nathan had been doing to her, what he would continue to do, and still she made the conscious decision to leave Taylor to her own devices, to make it a habitual occurrence, even, so that Nathan could find release three nights a week instead of one.

This newfound knowledge makes something inside Taylor splinter. Meredith strides away without another word, and Taylor withdraws upstairs and hugs her knees to her chest on the bathroom floor, fighting back angry tears, and the convulsions of her own fluttery lungs.

Sometime later, as navy ribbons of darkening sky begin to shift through the frosted glass window above the shower, the laughter of the girls in the living room also wafts up the stairwell. She imagines them sitting in a huddled circle on the floor in front of the TV, sharing whispery gossip as they paint each other nails, or braid each other's hair. Maybe Meredith tells them that her stupid foster sister gives Nathan blowjobs every night, and Taylor likes it, or that Taylor lets Nathan hump her like a dog whenever he feels like it, and she does nothing to stop him.

The bile that crawls up her throat comes fast and hard, and she lunges for the toilet, desperately flipping open the lid, unloading the contents of her afternoon lunch. Afterwards, she sinks against the toilet rug and sobs, open-mouthed, over the rim.

At the sink, she rinses the acrid taste from her mouth and turns off the faucet, wiping the snot from her nose with the back of her hand. Then she goes to her room, to her side of the closet, and puts on her jacket. It's thin, but it's the only one she has. She zips it to her chin with the sort of decisiveness of someone who knows they are about to do something they shouldn't, but will not be held back.

There is a tree outside the window whose branches often scratch against the pane on windy nights. She pulls open the window and climbs on those branches now until she has reached the ground, trembling the whole way.

Thoughts of Meredith and her friends are quickly forgotten. Now all she thinks about is Mr. J, his lies. His abandonment. Were they doomed to be Antiscians forever? Was that their fate? Had he made her a promise only to take such cruel pleasure in breaking it? She thought before there was something synodic about the two of them, something astral about their projection, their intended destination, like two nebulae hurling towards each other in a fiery, preordained collision. She had been so sure of it, but now she wonders if she had only been clinging to a phantom sensation, an apparitional hope, a paracosm of her own faulty design.

She hates herself so fiercely for it.

She doesn't know where she is going. She doesn't know what she will do. She takes to the sidewalk with long strides, like she's in some particular hurry to get somewhere, when really all she wants is to just be anywhere but here. There's a park nearby, with broken swings and a yellow slide and rusted monkey bars, and she thinks about going there, to sit on the rickety swings to clear her mind, to think, but the night is frigid, and she is too cold to be solitary and sit in one place, so she keeps moving.

While the sky is devoid of stars, the moon hangs like a fishing hook low in the sky, partially obstructed by the tail ends of wispy nighttime clouds.

She walks for a long time, past South Side suburbia and into the hub and hum of the city, where the streets are busy, crawling with nightlife. The restaurants are packed. It's two hours till midnight, but still people stand outside bars, holding glass bottles in one hand and drunkenly waving sparklers in the other. The air is heavy with the residual smoke from cigarettes and faraway fireworks. The raucous laughter and excited chatter of an entire city waiting for midnight seems to follow her for a long time as she makes her way towards a quieter, industrial part of town. Out here, no one will find here.

There's an electrical plant on one side of the wide channel and an abandoned shipping warehouse on the other, and on both sides a long, tangled maze of train tracks that are no longer in use. Connecting the two land masses is a metal bridge with railroad tracks laid down its middle, the years of disuse evident in the rusted metal, the rotting wood, and the graffiti.

She finds that the city is quiet here. She carefully steps onto one of the wooden planks of the bridge, then makes her way towards the center. Here she stops, looks down. The water beneath her is quiet, still. Black. She wonders at its contents, what lurks beneath the inky surface. Wonders if the icy slap of water would kill her instantly, or if she'd feel it, her bones shattering, her skull splitting in two, her tendons snapping like bungee cords placed under too much strain. And if the fall doesn't kill her, then the temperature surely will. It wouldn't take long, she thinks.

She sees the lights of the nearby electrical plant, flickering across the water through the break in the trees that line the channel. It gives the water an almost milky, soft appearance.

Taylor grips the rails of the bridge before she really knows what she's doing, climbs over to the other side, where there's just barely enough room to stand on the jutting planks. The metal at her back is cold, as if it's pressed up against bare skin and not two layers of clothing. Her knuckles are as white as the moon where she grips the railing behind her, and she lets out a slow exhale, watches her breath fog in front of her and then drift away.

Then she's leaning forward, her arms fully extended as she grips the railing behind her, her upper body outstretched, hanging over the dark expanse of water that shifts below her. If she listens closely, she can hear the waves softly lapping at the support beams that hold up the bridge. She closes her eyes, feels her legs trembling, feels the icy wind sift through the loose tendrils of her hair. Her fingers are cramping from how tightly she grips the metal bar.

She could do it. She could let go. This could all be over in an instant. This one thing she actually has control over: whether she takes her life, or keeps it.

There's something wet on her cheek, and she's not sure if it's a spray of water from below or her own tears. The bridge creaks and sighs as the wind moves through it. She focuses on that, lets the wind whisper to her what it will. She can almost hear it coaxing her forward.

Let go. _Let go_.

So she does. She lets go.

And when she does, all she has is this sudden realization that nearly splits in her half, that she's done it, _this is it_ , this is the freefall—but it lasts for only a second before it is cruelly yanked away.

A hand grips her upper arm right as she has begun her fall forward into oblivion. It yanks her back, hard, against the railing, so hard she sees stars, and then there is arm around her waist, and she cries out as she is roughly tugged back over the railing, onto the other side of the bridge.

She doesn't know if she's furious or relieved. She screams out into the darkness nevertheless, fighting off the hands that grip her as she tries to right herself. She spins around, chest heaving, struggling for the air she thought would get sucked out of her upon the impact that had not happened.

And it's him. _Him_. The reason for this, for all of it. He is there in all of his glory—not how he was at the orphanage, but the way she remembers him as a child. The purple suit, the greasepaint, the putrid shade of green clinging to the tangled strands of his hair. The image of him leaves her breathless, and she feels as though she's caught inside a moment that's been frozen in time.

When he takes a step towards her, she instinctively stumbles back. She can sense the fury tearing through him, can practically taste his cataclysmic rage. She realizes—in this moment— she is completely terrified of him.

"What do you think you're _doing_?" he growls. The intensity in his gaze alone is enough to plow through her, knock her to the ground—but it's his voice that levels her, raw and gutted, and the touch of breathless anger, like he thought, for just a moment, that he wouldn't be able to stop her. Like he was about to lose her forever.

"I—I thought you weren't going to come back," she whispers. She is shaking all over, so badly there's no use in hiding it. She doesn't know if she trembles from the cold, what she had almost done, or from the shock of finally seeing him here in front of her. All she knows is that it's hard to catch her breath, and she's so lightheaded she threatens to succumb to unconsciousness. She swallows instead, tries desperately to calm her fluttering lungs, her wild pulse.

 _This is real_ , she tells herself. He isn't a mirage this time. He's here in front of her. He came back.

"I never left," he snarled, the agitation in his voice clear and unmistakable, making her wince at its impact. "I've been here the whole time."

It takes a moment for her to understand the significance of his statement, but the way he is looking at her leaves no room for misinterpretation. He doesn't just mean here, on the bridge, but everything. From the second he left her at the orphanage to this very moment they're sharing now. He was always there, wasn't he? Watching.

She shudders at this revelation. "How much?" she wants to know, hating how her voice cracks. "How much did you see?"

"All of it."

It dawns on her suddenly that she _hadn't_ imagined him at the bus stop. He really had been there. She thought she had been going crazy, and yet this whole time he had been… he had been taunting her. Testing her, perhaps. But then another realization strikes her, and she looks up sharply to meet his gaze.

"But—but you knew that—Nathan?" She knows she's not making any sense, that her speech is disjointed, incoherent. "You could've… you didn't stop him," she says.

"I know that," he snaps, annoyed. "He didn't do anything I didn't want him to."

Taylor is breathless in her confusion, her hurt. Tears sting at her eyes. "What does that mean?"

"It means it didn't go farther than I allowed it to."

Her legs are so weak she can barely stand. She feels the tears streaking down her cheeks, licked away by the icy tendrils of wind away almost as soon as they fall. "I don't understand, if you knew… _why_?"

"It's about con-trol," he says, stalking towards her. "And _losing_ it. It's about finding what makes you tick, about finding your breaking point." He stops when he's standing in front of her, when only a thin line of space separates them, scarcely enough space for even the wind to pass through. Then he looks her up and down, and the disgust in his eyes makes her want to curl in on herself and never face him again. "I thought you knew that."

The insult stings, but not as much as the knowledge that he had known the whole time—just like Meredith—and had not intervened.

"You're despicable!" she cries.

"And _you_ ," he snarls, crowding her space, gloved hand suddenly gripping her jaw, pulling her even closer, "you have the audacity to look surprised. You know what I am. What you are. What I made you to be." He releases her, and Taylor lifts her hands as if to push him away, to strike him—but when she raises her eyes to his she sees the adrenaline there, the excitement, as if he wishes that she would. He _wants_ her to hit him.

"It's too late to play the martyr now."

Taylor hangs her head, cries even harder. This isn't how this was supposed to go. It wasn't supposed to be like this. She had imagined their reunion a thousand different times, in a thousand different ways, and none of them had gone like this. In none of them did she cry, and in none of them did he look at her with such putrid revulsion.

She wonders if he must sense this, because suddenly his gloved hand is on her cheek, and his touch is soft, almost deceptively tender. She looks up at him through blurry eyes, her brows furrowed in confusion.

"Your problem is that you don't _trust_ me," he says, so quiet she nearly has to strain to hear him.

"I do trust you," she whimpers, knowing how pitiful she sounds. Knowing she's lying.

"Look where you are," he says, gesturing to the bridge they're standing on, what she had almost done, "all evidence points to the contrary. If you really trusted me," he says, "you'd know that I was waiting for the opportune moment." He raises his brows, knowing he's caught her interest. "I had to lay down the edges of the puzzle before I could begin to fill in the middle, see?"

She feels the wind on her cheeks and the tip of her nose, knows they're red because of how badly they sting from the cold. She sniffles, and then shakes her head. "I don't understand."

Mr. J leans forward, bringing their faces closer, so close she can feel the heat of his breath across the bridge of her nose. "I _saved_ him for you. Nathan."

Taylor swallows the lump that's formed in her throat. "Saved him?"

A wild burst of color in the sky suddenly sprouts above them, followed by an explosion of crackling sound that nearly splits her ear drums. She cranes her neck towards the night sky, where it's set ablaze in a burst of golden light. More colors appear—red, then blue, purple, green—and she watches the cascade of sparks fall like rain, and the colors disintegrate into wispy tendrils of smoke before a new burst of color tears across the black.

 _Happy New Year._

When she looks back at Mr. J, she sees his outstretched hand, and her gaze trails lower until she sees what it is he is offering to her. And suddenly it all makes sense.

A knife.

She lifts her head, meets his gaze—his eyes which never left hers—and searches his expression, desperately trying to read what's behind those black eyes.

She lifts her hand to his.

She takes the knife.

* * *

 _ **Author's Notes:**_ At this story's inception, I had no intentions of ever continuing this beyond the first chapter. I wanted it to be a one-shot, and for a very long time, it was.

Several weeks ago, after being continually plagued with ideas that I was unable to shove aside, I now find myself here, at the end of chapter two, wholly immersed, and with chapter three already halfway completed. So please share with me your thoughts, good and bad. I would love to hear them. And also please know that a short review is better than no review.

Additional info: "Lethe" is a river in the Greek underworld that, when drunk from, made lost souls forget the sufferings of life. Directly interpreted, it means "oblivion" or "something to make you enter oblivion and forget."

"Antiscians" are people who live on opposite sides of the world, "whose shadows at noon are cast in opposite directions."

When the Joker talks about "waiting for the opportune moment", he's talking about waiting for Taylor to reach a boiling point. He has to wait until he knows she'll be ready to kill for him if he asked, and he has to know he's given enough time to Nathan to do to Taylor what he will, thus furthering Taylor's despair—despair which eventually will bloom into anger, hatred, et cetera. It's difficult to explain this in the narrative because this chapter is told from Taylor's POV, and she often fails to grasp how the Joker continually manipulates her. He also speaks to her in abstracts because he knows it'll go over her head.

Last thing: I'm knee-deep in Star Wars right now, and a lot of dialogue/imagery in this chapter has very much been (unintentionally) influenced by my multiple viewings of _The Last Jedi_ … can you tell?


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